One aspect of the present invention relates to a system that uses the Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and/or the Vehicle to infrastructure communication for safety and mobility applications. The invention provides methods and systems to make the V2X realized and effectively used in any intelligent transportation system toward automated vehicle system. Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is the main enabling technology for connected vehicle applications that will reduce vehicle crashes through fully connected transportation system with integrated wireless devices and road infrastructure.
The integration between the current production crash avoidance systems, V2X technology, and other transportation infrastructure (as taught in our system) paves the way for realizing automated vehicles system. The safety, health, and cost of accidents (on both humans and properties) are major concerns for all citizens, local and Federal governments, cities, insurance companies (both for vehicles and humans), health organizations, and the Congress (especially due to the budget cuts, in every level). People inherently make a lot of mistakes during driving (and cause accidents), due to the lack of sleep, various distractions, talking to others in the vehicle, fast driving, long driving, heavy traffic, rain, snow, fog, ice, or too much drinking. If we can make the driving more automated by implementing different scale of safety applications and even controlling the motion of the vehicle for longer period of driving, that saves many lives and potentially billions of dollars each year, in US and other countries. We introduce here an automated vehicle infrastructure and control systems and methods. That is the category of which the current invention is under, where V2X communication technology is vital component of such system, with all the embodiments presented here and in the divisional cases, in this family.
DSRC (Dedicated short range communication) is expected to play a significant role in Transportation applications for Public Safety and Traffic Management. Some of the key applications especially safety and mobility application requires an accurate representation of the road segments. For better and accurate results in these Applications, One would be requiring location MAPs. An example set of these applications is the safety related ones on intersections. Given the number of signalized intersections in United States (around 0.3 Million) and many more across the globe, the required number of MAPs required are very high, and thus, very hard to manage. Lane level maps are required for most of these applications which is currently not available. Even if these maps will be available on some scale in the future, they will be more of a Static nature, and would require frequent updates both for temporary and permanent changes in these MAPs. As this very approach of updating is time consuming, and given the number of MAPs and the frequency of changes, creating and maintaining these MAPs would be a real challenge.
The solution discussed in this invention, as one embodiment, addresses this very challenge of Creating and Maintaining MAPs for V2X applications. The invention method uses the data exchange between DSRC (or equivalent technology) on board unit (OBU) in the vehicle and DSRC (or equivalent technology) road side equipment (RSE) in the infrastructure, to communicate the data of interest, required to build the map database. The RSE receives vehicle dynamic data measured and transmitted by the OBU, processes it, creates the map, stores the map, and updates the map using the methods explained in the following sections. The presented method also takes advantage of the traffic controller data (when available), such as signal phase to create the supported correlation between sensed vehicles' movements and the status of the traffic controller signal data.
Some of the prior art in this area are (foreign patents): EP2486556A1, CN102016507A, and CN101210825B. However, none of the prior art teaches the features shown in this current disclosure, as detailed below. In this disclosure, we show some advantages for our method, for example:
Consider Dynamic Map Versus Static Map:
Using Dynamic MAPs for V2X applications provides numerous benefits over Static MAPs. Listed below are some of these advantages, for example:                The speed with which the changes in environment are determined and reflected in the MAP message would be far quicker than those of any other methods.        Dynamic MAPs enable V2X applications to provide more accurate results, compared to Static MAPs.        The method drastically reduces the number of manual intervention for MAP maintenance (Dynamic MAP) to bare minimal (or none).        As the V2X applications are going to use the very GPS data collected by the vehicles, a MAP based on these collected data would give better results, compared to MAPs generated by other means.        